Vietnam - A Belated Gaming Invasion?

Thanks to the New York Times for its article (free reg. req.) discussing the plethora of recent videogames based on the Vietnam War. The piece notes: "Before the year is out, the game industry will have released five major titles involving a conflict that it has largely ignored for nearly two decades", and muses: "World War II games have in principle been simple to design. But because Vietnam changed the rules of engagement, the virtual battles had to be chaotic and the goals less clear." The article ends with a quote from one of the creators of Shellshock: Nam '67, arguing: "With video games, I think you can be more neutral. You can say, this is the environment. Go and experience what it was like and then come up with your own verdict of what you think of war."

Comments

Simple

[minusthink]

It was hard to create a convincing jungle prior to today's ultrapowerful computers and graphic cards. Look at the levels in Goldeneye for the n64 and rainbow six (1), they aren't environments that are too impressive.

Other forgotten wars

[joeljkp]

I think this is probably just the game industry trying to find new material after WWII has been beaten to death over the past few years. After the Vietnam Era, what'll be the next video game wars? Gulf Storm? Somalia? Afghanistan?

What about the old forgotten wars? The War of 1812? Korea? WWI, for crying out loud?

Who's deciding what?

[MMaestro]

"With video games, I think you can be more neutral. You can say, this is the environment. Go and experience what it was like and then come up with your own verdict of what you think of war."

True, if a game is really well made a developer can leave the verdict of the actions in a game to be justifiable or not. But the problem is, as long as human beings form these ARTIFICIAL ENVIRONMENTS, there will always be the insertion of bias into the game.

Take Battlefield : Vietnam. Why don't American players find strung up dead allies in the middle of the jungles as warning? If I was a soldier in the U.S. Army during the Vietnam and I saw that I'd think the Vietnamese were savages. Vice versa, why don't vietnamese players start off as lowly peasants and only 'graduate' to guns after watching their village 'accidentally' get bombed by the U.S.? You don't see this because its not what the developers WANT you to see.

The developers want you to see a war with no goals, no black, no white, just a lot of greys. If I made a Vietnam game where 90% of the missions involved rescuing American P.O.W.s after they've been imprisoned and tortured for years, you'd think the U.S. was justified (And yes, there would be lots of gore). On the other hand, if I made a Vietnam game with 50% of the game having the player be nothing more than a rice farmer sneak past American soldiers killing and taking away innocent villagers, you'd think its only right that the Vietnamese were justified.

The whole idea of looking at a war through someone else's vision is misleading at least, and propaganda at most. Wheres the gore? Where the years in POW camps? Where are the villages being napalmed?

WWII events are captured well in WWII games (other than obviously the Holocaust and the Pacific theatre but thats changing). Air raids? Got that. Seemingly out of nowhere artillery attacks? Got that. Charging machine-guns nests while your buddies go down? Got that. Tank battles? Got that. This is why people have generally let WWII games off with such ease. They knew what happened, they knew how it happened, and developers knew enough to put those events into the games. They didn't skimp on the details whenever possible and the public respected them for that, even if they avoided topics such as the Holocaust, and the Russian and Pacific theatres until recently.